1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, a printing apparatus, a method for controlling an information processing apparatus, and a method for controlling a printing apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are sheet processing apparatuses that perform processing on a sheet conveyed from a printing apparatus. Sheet processing apparatuses include a stacker for stacking a large number of sheets. The stacker allows a large number of print products to be continuously printed and thus can increase productivity.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-219495 discloses a printing apparatus that conveys a sheet to a stacker. According to Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-219495, in consideration of the length of time in ejecting the printed sheets from the stackers, print jobs other than the jobs designating a tray of the same stacker can be executed to discharge the sheets in parallel, which increases productivity when the user ejects the printed products from the stackers. Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-219495 further discloses a technique for controlling a job to promptly eject the printed products by an automatic ejection from the stacker upon the completion of the job.
On the other hand, when a print job which discharges a sheet to a stacker is performed in a printing system such as a print on demand (POD), there is a need to discharge the printed products in specific sets to the same stacker because the user does not want to divide the printed products in the middle of the job.
For example, when the tray cannot hold the printed products in the middle of a copy, printing is continued using another sheet discharge destination or using the same sheet discharge destination after the printed products on the tray are taken out. In such a case, it may be desirable that the sheet discharge destination is switched at the time of the completion of a previous copy.
In addition to assembling in units of copies, there are many needs to discharge sheets to a tray, for example, discharge sheets in sets of jobs for which the same offline finishing is taken, and in sets of jobs in which a plurality of jobs is packaged as a unit. In light of these needs, there is a technique that detects the number of remaining sheets that the stacker can yet stack and obtains the number of sheets to be output in a job after this so as to calculate whether all the job to be printed can be output to the stacker. Thus, the technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 5-155511 determines the sheet discharge destination.
However, the user cannot make a reservation in order to eject sheets before the execution of a job in the conventional techniques.
The technique in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-219495 does not allow the reservation for ejecting a sheet before the execution of a job although the reservation can be made to eject a sheet after the completion of a job.
The technique in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 5-155511 does not allow the reservation for ejecting a sheet before the execution of a job because the tray is pulled out only after determining that a tray full occurs.